U.S. officials have long accused China of stealing American technology in designing and building fighter jets, but while China learned how to build advanced fighter jets, its pilots couldn’t fly them well.
That may be starting to change, according to U.S. officials.
U.S. and allied intelligence officials warned on Wednesday that the Chinese government is stepping up a campaign to lure former fighter pilots from Western countries to train Chinese pilots.
The five countries – the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – an intelligence-sharing partnership known as the Five Eyes, said in a bulletin that China’s People’s Liberation Army was seeking to tap “the skills and expertise of these people” to improve its own air operations.
“To address its own shortcomings, the People’s Liberation Army is actively recruiting top Western talent to train its airmen, using private companies around the world who hide their ties to the PLA and pay exorbitant salaries to recruits,” said Michael C. Casey, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
China has been beefing up its air and naval capabilities, and leaders in Beijing have warned they may eventually use force to unify the country with Taiwan. U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the findings, said there was little doubt that Chinese fighter pilots appear to be improving.
But officials debate whether the improvement is due to training by foreign pilots or to more time Chinese pilots spending in their own training programs.
Officials say China’s efforts to attract pilots for its People’s Liberation Army to train have been ongoing for years but have intensified. Britain issued a warning in September after it tightened laws banning foreign pilots from training.
U.S. officials said the Chinese military had set up dozens of nominally independent training centers in several countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, and that recruited pilots were given the opportunity to fly a range of cutting-edge aircraft and were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While the pilots may not have initially known they were training the Chinese military, that soon became apparent, according to officials briefed on the investigation.
Officials did not say how many allied pilots had been involved in training the Chinese military, but U.S. officials said it was well into the dozens. The United Kingdom has reported that at least 30 former British pilots have been involved in training the Chinese military. Three former Canadian pilots, seven former New Zealand pilots and a group of former German pilots have also been accused of training the Chinese military.
According to U.S. officials, training is conducted in China as well as at centers in other countries. In 2022, a Chinese fighter jet crashed and the pilot ejected. Videotape of the incident showed one of the pilots on the ground as an English-speaking Westerner.
In September, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., then head of the Air Force and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned U.S. aviation officers not to aid China. “The People’s Liberation Army hopes to use your knowledge and technology to fill gaps in its military capabilities,” he wrote in a memo to airmen.
Teaching advanced combat skills to foreigners can quickly lead to legal action: The Arms Export Control Act not only bans the sale of weapons, but also the training of foreign militaries without permission from the U.S. government.
The US is trying to put former Marine Corps pilot Daniel Duggan on trial for training Chinese pilots.
Duggan was indicted in 2017 on charges of training Chinese pilots in 2010 and 2012, but the indictment was not made public until his arrest in Australia in 2022. Duggan denies the charges and is fighting extradition to the United States.
Intelligence officials said the announcement, released Wednesday, was intended to discourage current and former military personnel from participating in the training. Casey said such efforts “endanger our military colleagues and threaten our national security.”
U.S. officials say China is not only seeking to learn U.S. and allied air tactics from former pilots, but also using drones, balloons and other technology to increase surveillance of military exercises, efforts that have sometimes led to reports of unidentified objects spotted near military bases.
Pentagon officials have attributed some of the mysterious unidentified object sightings to relatively common drone technology, and they say the drone and balloon surveillance is part of a Chinese government effort to learn more about how U.S. fighter jets fly and operate from aircraft carriers.
